Kathleen Lau

It's no wonder IT leaders are focusing concern on IT infrastructure and operations costs when it accounts for 60 per cent of total IT spend. Since things are still uncertain despite the economy showing signs of improvement, this area of IT "strikes a resonant cord," said Jay Pultz, vice-president and distinguished analyst with Gartner Inc.

"It has such a high interest among CIOs because they're not going to meet their budget goals if (infrastructure and operations) doesn't meet its (budget)," said Pultz during a recent Webinar discussing ways enterprises can cut costs in their IT infrastructure and operations (I&O). Gartner defines I&O as everything in IT except business applications.

Cybercriminals could start to take advantage of the popularity of search engines like Google as vehicles for relaying malicious code to botnets every time a particular keyword is searched for, said one Vancouver-based security expert.

Creators of botnets could potentially inject code in various Web sites and choose particular keywords that nobody is yet using on the Web, said Vaclav Vincalek, president of Pacific Coast Information Systems (PCIS) Ltd.

In the newest Star Trek movie, the Romulan enemy Nero produces a mug shot of Spock in the hopes of finding him. But it's not just any mug shot. It's the 3-D floating hologram kind, thrown into the air like a ball before halting in mid-air before its onlookers. Certainly, it can be a little discomfiting to be faced by a floating head, but we don't live in star date 2233.04 where visual displays are so not like we know them today.

Future inhabitants of the universe -- be they Humans, Romulans or Vulcans -- interact and visualize information in dynamic and alluring ways. The young Spock's education is a solo process as he sits encircled by a screen displaying words, graphs and images narrated by a female voice. In a bar on Earth (yes, there are still bars), Uhura flips through a menu card that markets beverage options with moving images, before ordering a Cardassian Sunrise among other things.

Artwork: Chip TaylorA Denmark-based analyst with research firm J. Boye said she's encountered an organization that, after implementing an enterprise-wide employee wiki, realized it didn't exactly have the right culture to bring it to life.

Discussions prior to the site launch debated whether employees should contribute anonymously or through profiles, and whether those profiles should include user photos, recounted Dorthe Jespersen. Ultimately, employees were allowed to contribute through profiles with pictures, she said, "but [the organization] had a conservative culture so no one actually wanted to make visible what they were working on right now."

Graphic: Chip TaylorAt peak hour, say midday, downloading 100 megabytes of data is approximately the equivalent of burning a bag of charcoal.

It's a little-known fact about carbon emissions that could help organizations operate more green, said Ron Dembo, CEO and founder of Zerofootprint Inc., a Toronto-based provider of software and services to help businesses and individuals be green.

The smart phone market in 2009 won't be the realm of solely Research in Motion Ltd. and Apple Inc., as additional handset vendors grab a share with the launch of their own products, according to Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based ABI Research Inc."

While the BlackBerry and iPhone have been the dominant players in the smart phone segment of the handset market, Tier 2 players like Samsung, HTC, and LG, and even Tier 3 players like Huawei will roll out products as well, the whitepaper predicted. And, smart phones will be positioned for mid-tier segments of emerging markets, as well as the developed world, it continued.

Illustration: Jeffrey PeloWhile a survey of Canadian chief information officers showed the preferred mode of communication among IT staff is e-mail, this may not be the best way to gauge employee satisfaction, according to an executive with Robert Half Technology International.

The study by the Toronto-based IT staffing firm, based on interviews with more than 270 CIOs from across Canada, found that 49 per cent of respondents preferred using e-mail to communicate with each other at work.

The use of e-mail may persist in corporations as a project collaboration tool to keep team members in the loop, but it's hardly the best route given individuals are often accidentally left off distribution lists, said a member of the open source TikiWiki Community.

"E-mail doesn't scale, it's not optimal, it's not efficient," said Marc Laporte, who is also the president of Avantech.net, a Montreal-based developer of collaborative TikiWiki-centric applications.

Business intelligence vendor Business Objects SA announced an information visualization tool that allows users to interact with their data through a dynamic yet familiar Microsoft user interface.

Xcelsius Present transforms the usual Microsoft Excel spreadsheet information into visuals that can be shared via PowerPoint and Adobe PDF files. The company said it helps users ultimately make better business decisions by applying data to interactive graphics like dials, charts and gauges to convey business cases and illustrate "what if" scenarios.